What happened in '37?
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Or 1918-1921 for Russian Anarchists.
Большой террор, The Great Purge, where Stalin murdered most of the revolutionaries who still had any influence and actually intended to make the USSR communist instead of Authoritarian with a red coat of paint.
![Cowbee [he/they]](https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/c18ce632-5fb5-4888-8226-3dc55a07acc4.jpeg "Cowbee [he/they]")
The ideological struggle that led to the Bolshevik civil war was not one of “authoritarianism” vs. “communism,” it was a war between Stalin’s centrist faction, which had the broadest support within the Bolsheviks at large, as well as Trotsky’s “left-opposition,” which distrusted the peasantry and felt that socialism was impossible without a revolution in western Europe. What changes do you believe those found guilty in the Moscow Trials and purge in general wished to enact that would have made the USSR “communist?”
Trotsky was kind of on to something, no? Yes, we can all agree that in the short term direct transition to real communism would have been a bridge too far to accomplish in a single generation, especially going from a largely pre-industrial Russia directly to a socialist society. People broadly lack the political will and understanding of how bad capitalism can get until they live under it. That said, there were more effective ways to actually move toward real socialism rather than an iron grip that gradually broke itself with its inefficiency. Unfortunately Stalin and his centrists were exactly the kind of довбойо́би to think they could strong-arm the process. In doing so he ended up undermining the whole project. I honestly do not know that the men murdered in the purge would have had a better answer. But they certainly understood the question a lot better than those holding the “trials.”
I disagree, frankly. Trotsky was, most charitably, someone who genuinely believed that constructing socialism was a doomed effort in the USSR, and that the peasantry would not end up allying with the proletariat. With this reading of Trotsky, he was an active sabateur of the socialist project helping organize very real and legitimate Fifth Column elements terrorizing the Soviet administration and public at large, out of a belief that this was necessary to implement socialism.
The problem is that Trotsky’s “permanent revolution” is wrong. The peasantry became fully aligned with the proletariat throughout the early 1930s, just before the purges. Stalin’s faction took the correct course of action, focusing on building up heavy industry to prepare for a coming resumption of World War. Communism must be global, and cannot be achieved in one country. However, the transition to communism globally must be made by socialist countries.
The Soviet Union was genuinely socialist. Social ownership was the principal aspect of the economy, and the working class did run the state and direct the social surplus. The Soviet Union was actually very efficient up until the Gorbachev era, it wasn’t Stalin that set the seeds for downfall but Khrushchev. The public by and large supported and loved Stalin until several years after Khrushchev’s secret speech, and Khrushchev’s reforms turned a blind eye to black markets forming a capitalist class that was effectively able to form a cohesive bloc. China has capitalists, but it integrates them into their system so as to control them and limit them. The later soviets did not, and this grew ideological withering within the CPSU.
To return to the purges, the assassination of Kirov by the Fifth Column elements prompted response. Regardless of the legitimacy of the trials, the fact of the matter is that there was a Bolshevik Civil War, so to speak. Even if we assume that all sides of it had good intentions, or even if we assume Stalin had bad intentions, it was still the more popularly supported and democratic decision to purge the party of the actual, real threat the Fifth Column presented, which is why Stalin was still so supported by the public until well after his death.
The idea that the Soviet Union was governed by an iron grip is a misconception. There were weaknesses in the Soviet democratic processes, and crisis after crisis effectively limited the extent to which democracy could effectively function. However, I intensely disagree with Trotsky’s suicidal plans, and I believe that the CPSU made the correct decision to reject such plans, and were forced to respond to real internal sabotage that stood to collapse the entire soviet project.
Gotta love it when the lies survive long past the time the liars found them useful.
Declassified CIA memo:
This is about Stalins death…
And it also shows that despite the myth being useful, the people at the CIA whose job it was to analyze the USSR knew Stalin was *not" an absolute dictator.
But you’d have to actually read it to know that so I can see how that might be hard. Maybe we can get an AI animated slopachter to read it as a short form video and then you’ll be able to follow along?
And also makes indirect mention of Stalin’s earlier purges of political rivals, so it’s the exact opposite of the evidence they were claiming.
The point, I believe, is that Stalin was never the caricature of a sole madman with no ability to be opposed throughout his tenure as head of state. The CIA report directly challenges that idea and instead suggests viewing Stalin as the “captain of a team,” one with large influence, sure, but one man in a web of collective leadership. The response to Kirov’s assassination, the event that directly led to the purges in the late 1930s, was not the decision of a single madman but instead a collective response to the perceived threat of Fifth Column-style elements, from what could be described as a “Bolshevik Civil War.”
After the death of Lenin, the Bolsheviks did not cleanly break for Stalin. However, this does not mean that they split into “good” and “bad,” but instead into those who coalesced around Stalin’s “centrist” Marxist-Leninist views, the Trotskyist “left-opposition” views, and the Bukharinist “right-opposition” views. This struggle was not merely one of open debate, but one that led directly to sabotage, armed resistance, and struggle. The broad majority of the Bolsheviks, and the population as a whole, supported Stalin and his position that industrialization was of prime importance. The opposition, therefore, was often an underground movement.
Bringing this to the assassination of Stalin’s close friend and ally Kirov, who was the only person other than the head of Stalin’s security detail he allowed into the sauna with him, the party found it necessary to investigate how and why a top Bolshevik was killed. This led directly to the Moscow Trials, which independent observers believed to be legitimate, but Trotsky and his followers alleged were rigged and used purely for political gain for Stalin.
No matter what truly happened, sham trial or no, there are two critical facts:
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The broad population and the CPSU supported the purges, this was not an invention of Stalin.
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The “Bolshevik Civil War” was a real power struggle that the CPSU could not simply ignore.
The caricature of Stalin as it exists in common western depiction is one of a twin devil with Hitler, an evil force of nature that all feared. This was largely something that happened after the death of Stalin, after Khrushchev’s not-so-secret “secret speech,” where Khrushchev advanced his own career by attacking Stalin (and, to be clear, the speech has had numerous inconsistencies and fabrications identified since the opening of the Soviet archives).
Stalin was by no means a saint, he made mistakes that we should not simply accept. However, the “black legend” of Stalin, as Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo calls it in his book on Stalin’s legend in particular, is one that serves a definite political aim: to delegitimize socialism, and depict anyone who supports the same systems that saw doubling of life expectancies in post-revolutionary Russia, that saw full employment and free healthcare and education, that saw a semi-feudal society reach space in only half a century, as essentially devils worshipping cultists of the twin-devil Stalin, as “Stalinists,” or “Tankies.”
The ghost of Stalin’s caricature is used to delegitimize Cuba, Vietnam, China, etc, and to delegitimize domestic support for these existing socialist countries. His popular image was transformed from someone who got on well with FDR and saw respect even in the western world, getting the honorary title of native American chief from indigenous tribes, to one of a twin evil with Hitler, for political aims at delegitimizing socialism. This isn’t to say, again, that he was perfect, merely that there is a difference between Stalin the man, and Stalin the legend.
Essentially the perfect example of a snake eating its own tail